Ethereum users will soon be able to interact with the blockchain in ways that were not possible before. According to co-founder Vitalik Buterin, native intelligent accounts – a feature that has been in the works for over a decade – are expected to arrive within a year as part of the upcoming modernization of the Hegota network.

Privacy tools provide the greatest benefits

For privacy-conscious users, this change may be more significant than most people realize. Protocols like Railgun have long depended on intermediaries called “public broadcasters” to carry out transactions. These intermediaries are a constant source of problems for users.

Reports indicate that Buterin wants to remove them completely, replacing this system with a public pool of general-purpose storage, eliminating the middleman and putting more control directly in the hands of the user.

His words were direct: “Indirect minimization is a core principle of not-ugly cypherpunk Ethereum — maximize what you can do, even if all the world’s infrastructure except Ether the chain itself falls.”

That’s a forceful statement. This signals how seriously the Ethereum team takes self-sufficiency at the protocol level.

Now the account abstraction.

We have been talking about account abstraction since the beginning of 2016, see the original EIP-86: https://t.co/HYLSTLHgWH

Now we finally have EIP-8141 ( https://t.co/jYqeS55j6P ), an omnibus that summarizes and solves all the remaining problems that AA faced…

— Vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 28, 2026

A decade of creation

Buterin admitted it’s a long road to get to this point. He emphasized that account abstraction has been discussed since early 2016. Now that EIP-8141 is included in the Hegot fork, the goal is to finally solve every problem that the concept was originally intended to solve – and then some.

The Ethereum Foundation’s public roadmap, called “The Straw Map”, places native account abstraction in the second half of 2026.

The proposed technical approach focuses on what Buterin calls “framework transactions.” Instead of a transaction being a single action, it becomes a series of frames.

Each frame may indicate data of another person and each frame may authorize the sender or payer of gas. One frame handles signature checking. Another deals with execution. It has a modular design and is built to be widely usable.

This also means that it becomes possible to pay transaction fees without owning ETH. Users can pay with other tokens through a payment contract or a specialized exchange that provides ETH on-site – without the need for a third party.

Quantum resistance also within reach

The Hegota’s upgrade doesn’t stop at intelligent accounts. Earlier this week, Buterin also presented a separate action plan on quantum resistance, identifying four areas of concern: validator signatures, data storage, user account signatures and zero-knowledge proofs.

Existing accounts are expected to fit seamlessly into the recent framework, while gaining access to batch operations and trade sponsorship.

After 10 years of promises, everything seems to finally be falling into place.

Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView